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Losing Steam? It’s Okay. You Can Still #WriteLikeCrazy

Hi, Eveyone. We are halfway through August, and I am noticing folks dropping out of #writelikecrazy. Activity on the hashtag is slowing down. I am not recieving as many cool photos of your workspaces. The purpose of this post is to help you get back on board because we still have a lot of month left.

One question to ask yourself is whether you have set reasonable goals for yourself. Remember, this is not NaNoWriMo. We are not trying to cough up a whole book in a month. We are just here to try and figure out some sustainable habits and jump start ourselves. If you started this month like a crash diet, it’s no wonder that you have burned out. But here is a great way that #WLC is better than a crash diet. When you fall off the diet wagon, you just gain the weight back. With #WLC, the progress you made in the early days is yours forever. You can start again anything and move forward.

So rethink your goals. Has school started for you, or your kids? Are you going on vacation? Factor that in and set a goal that you can read. Can you do a page a day? Maybe thirty minutes on the timer. Give up watching Law & Order on Netflix and five that 42 minutes to your manuscript. As they say– A year from now, you will wish you had started today.

Are you second guessing yourself in general? Are you worried that what you’re writing isn’t good enough? May I offer this tweet from Anne Lamott whose wonderful book “Bird By Bird” really gets my engine running:

To be fair, sure a famous writer like Anne Lamott is coming from a different place than most of us– afterall, she is, apparently in bed while you might be at work. But there is still wisdom in what she says. Write. Even if it’s bad. If it’s bad, you can fix it. But you can’t fix it until you’re written it. Write that shitty first draft. Don’t be mean to yourself. Don’t tell yourself that it’s not good enough, or that you’re not good enough.